Technology in Film: A Horrifying Cliche or a Thrilling Innovation?

The semiotic relationship of film and technology influence each other in storytelling, interweaving their codependency into the very helix of cinema DNA. One of the earliest examples, evidenced by Dziga Vertov's Man with A Movie Camera from 1929, highlights this dependency with its title and the famous experimental showcase anthropomorphising the camera. Vertov's man has, and is, its camera appearing as both subject and tool.

Almost a hundred years later, with the release of Searching (2018) and its sequel Missing (2023), the relationship between technology and film is as present now as it was with Vertov's fiction. The ways filmmakers utilise gadgets and gizmos invent beats, narrative vices, or in the instance of both Searching and Missing, become its storytelling medium.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) is accredited for being the pioneer of the contemporary found footage film, a style replicated in Aneesh Chaganty's Searching, also spawning a slew of genre films across the millennia tending to gravitate towards horror and thriller, a genre typically associated for being more accessible to indie and debuting filmmakers due to its relative affordability for budgets. 

Rather than purchasing new equipment, filmmakers can creatively problem-solve by making use of what they have around them; Paranormal Activity (2007) opted to use a stationary home video camera, whilst Cyberbully (2015), The Unfriended (2014) and Host (2020) each tell its story from the perspective of the computer screen.

Of course, many will associate technology in horror as the convenient plot device of losing signal, Wi-Fi or service before the threat begins. A movie could be over with a phone call, a ping from Find My Friends or smart home cameras installed, a truth satirically mocked in Jordan Peele's Us (2019), where a dying Elisabeth Moss cries out to her smart speaker to ring the police, mishearing and instead playing N.W.A's anti-authoritarian expletive single. The familiarity of the recognisable tech, complete with its failings, places us, as an audience within its diegesis, immersing us with contextual iconography.

On the other hand, Searching found success for more than its story about the primal urge to rescue a lost daughter. It instead echoed audiences in its characters. The private and personal profiles we build ourselves, the cyberstalking, and the pursuit of information in the oversaturated pool that is the Internet. We saw ourselves portrayed, quite literally, on-screen in a way that acknowledged what the technology was doing and how it was going about its delivery. Equally, Paranormal Activity, during its initial test screenings, had audiences leave early, not out of boredom, but rather fright, as production chief Adam Goodwin told the Los Angeles Times. Technology serves once more as both a subject and a tool.

Therefore it is likely to explain why we find it so jarring during on-screen texting sequences between characters using outdated colloquialisms and abbreviations like ‘c u l8r'. Typing in lower-case or shorthand causing subconscious aggravation removes us from the immersion regardless of genre or context. Technology is not to be used to tell the story, driving it forward as a lazy deus ex machina. It is to be used as a creative exploration of form.

Where cinema developed from Edison's Kinetoscope, Lumiere's Cinématographe, and Robert Paul's adaptation of Edison's patented camera, technology has always been at the forefront of creativity. It is in harnessing this creativity that the director can accomplish something magnificent.